Word: readerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...release, the jacket art of The Corrections--a clean-cut family sitting at a holiday table laden with turkey, cranberry-jelly slices and radish rosettes--seemed like a Lynchian dig at Norman Rockwell Americana. Today the image just seems, well, nice. And before Sept. 11 a literate reader would most likely have identified with the novel's neurotic, sophisticated grown children. Today it's hard for even the most jaded not to feel more like Enid, hoping against hope and reality for one more normal holiday...
...narrative or emotional information at a time. That doesn't help the three young stars, on whose slim shoulders the whole project rests; they are competent but charisma-free. The film lacks moviemaking buoyancy--the feeling of soaring in space that Rowling's magic-carpet prose gives the reader. The picture isn't inept, just inert...
With most biographies, it's only the specialist reader who bothers to flip back to the footnotes. Not so with Theodore Rex (Random House; 772 pages; $35). The second volume of Edmund Morris' projected three-volume set on the life of Teddy Roosevelt is likely to have just about everybody taking a peek back there once or twice. People are going to want to reassure themselves that the gifted but infamous Morris has not made up some of his nicely observed details, and not just because so much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of good...
...Hindi speakers will find it difficult understanding the smattering of untranslated vernacular in the text. What a reader can't help but savor is Joshi's joy in language. This is an author who does not merely use words, he coddles them. Joshi may not have only constructed a future that lies within the pages of his novel?but a literary future for himself...
...Rowling succeeds in painting a vivid picture of a magical world that forces the reader to use his or her imagination and enter Harry’s world. It is easy enough to relate to Harry’s life with his aunt and uncle, because people like that certainly exist in everyday life; however, it takes a leap to put oneself in the world that begins on Platform Nine and Three-quarters at the train station. Part of the draw of these books is that exact leap, stretching one’s imagination further than normal life allows. Perhaps...